My Favourite Goodreads Feature

I want to talk about my favourite Goodreads feature. Most people probably know about this, but I just love it, so I want to talk about it. Besides, I’ve finally got all my shelves updated! (That was a big project, let me tell you!)

My favourite little button in the whole of Goodreads is this one:

It doesn’t look like much, does it? However, for someone as trope obsessed as I am, it’s a godsend.

So, anyone who reads this blog knows how much I adore tropes. What might not be so obvious is that I can be fairly fussy about how those tropes match up with each other. For example: I LOVE marriage of convenience stories, but only in historicals. I often find them silly and unconvincing in contemporaries. I like ‘neighbours falling in love’ stories, but usually only in contemporaries. The trope doesn’t do much for me in historicals. The list goes on!

I also get in extremely specific moods. Sometimes I will want a book that is a ‘contemporary romance where an ex-con hero gets snowed in with the heroine’. Or a ‘medieval romance where a beta hero and feisty heroine enter into a marriage of convenience’. Or a ‘nerd heroine in the 19th century falls in love’. When I get like that, any other book I read tends to be a disappointment.

Now, though, I don’t have to go hunting far and wide through my TBR pile to find these specific trope combinations. They are all right there thanks to that little ‘select multiple’ button.

For those that don’t know what it does, it allows you to select multiple Goodreads shelves at once, thereby finding books that are only on ALL the shelves you select.

So, those are all the books I already own that are waiting for me to read them.

Next, I will select which genre I am in the mood for, usually a romance subgenre. For example:

And then I can pick whichever tropes I want to go along with that! These can include which era of history (medieval, elizabethan, 18th century, 19th century, early 20th century…), tropes such as fake relationships, or wounded heroes, or virgin heroes. (If you see my shelves, I have a lot more specific ones for hero tropes. This is mostly just because I am much fussier with my heroes!)

Unfortunately, you can only select 3 shelves at a time, so I can’t get TOO specific. But, still, it’s now so much easier to find exactly what I’m looking for in a book. Hopefully it will stop me wasting my precious reading time hunting through my to-read shelf, trying to find something that I feel like reading.

And now that I have my shelves sorted, it is also easier for me to see tropes I like that are a little more obscure:

Gaps in the market! If anyone has any recs for those tropes, let me know!

I can also warn myself about tropes or genres that I’m not so keen on in books I might otherwise enjoy:

So, there you have it! The best Goodreads feature for trope-obsessed people that buy way too many books!